Walking Feather

by
Scott Maddix

The heat.

What I remember most about that day is the heat.

I was sitting in the declining shadow of an empty storefront reading Baudelaire and trying not to doze off when I felt a shadow, a lessening of the sun-pressure on my scorched legs which had been sticking out into the light since this morning.

There, standing between my legs and haloed like an acid-trip visitation, stood the john.

He wore a rumpled, sweat-stained suit, but it didn't say cop, it said salesman.

"You the Gypsy?" he asked, and I nodded.

I'm not a Gypsy, I'm an Indian, but what the hell? I give them what they want.

"Give me your hand," I said, and in the time it took him to help me lever myself off the burning sidewalk, I had him.

In that touch I knew all his secrets, all his needs, and just how much he was willing to pay.

It was a good thing he had come along. It had been days since I'd received a clean offer. Two undercover cops, a psycho and a man infected with at least three deadly diseases had all been deftly turned down without explanation, and that was good. But safe doesn't pay the rent, does it?

I pretended to haggle a little over the price, and I led him to a nearby motel where the manager is a friend of mine.

Inside, the painted cinderblocks had the texture of varnished cottage cheese and it smelled like any cheap motel room in the summer. The door shut and locked, and the john took me in his arms. 

"Take off your clothes," he whispered, so close in my ear I felt it more than heard it.

The blood was rushing to all the places it always does, and he blushed as I looked him in the eye. 

Slowly, making him wait, I stripped down, pulling my shirt over my head and dropped it to the floor. I shook my head so the tangled mane of dark hair that marked my heritage blinded me briefly, and settled to partially veil a face still boyish enough to get the johns.

He licked his lips, and a drop of sweat rolled down one temple.
I never took my eyes off him, and his gaze never wavered.

I undid my belt, and made my usual mental note that I ought to replace it soon, as the leather was cracked around where the buckle held the tail in its mouth, and someday soon would break. I opened the front of my jeans, giving the john his first glimpse of what he was paying me for, the first wisps of hair shading my crotch just visible above the snaggle-toothed zipper that still only barely kept the front of my jeans closed.

He was still watching intently, and just to torture him a bit more, I stood there a moment, not moving, knowing the dim sunlight that leaked through the rubberized motel curtains must make my figure maddeningly elusive to him. I ran my fingers casually across my hairless chest, briefly playing with a nipple and then running them through my hair, flashing a downy armpit because I knew he was into that.

I stepped forward and put my hands on his shoulders. In the touch I again saw inside his mind, saw the image of the boy, the summer he was remembering.

"My name is—"

"Johnny," he finished, his eyes widening. I knew he had chosen me because of a superficial resemblance to an old childhood buddy, a friend he secretly had loved. I knew he'd been carrying around the memory of their last day together for twenty years. I was going to set him free.

I allowed the image of his long-lost childhood playmate to grow in his mind, and smiled at his sharp intake of breath. I know they're always surprised, the first time they feel my power. 

In his mind now, in our mind, we were floating on a raft on a small pond somewhere in upstate New York. We had been friends for as long as either of us could remember, and this was the last afternoon before my family mysteriously moved away—the john never actually knew why.

We had been skinny dipping in this secluded spot all day, and now we were soaking up the warmth of the afternoon sun.

"Johnny?" The john, who's name was Randy, was 17 in this vision, and he leaned up on one elbow with a look of urgency on his face.

"Yeah?" I answered, carefully not opening my eyes.

Randy's memory told me that the first time he'd played this scene, he'd dropped his eyes and said, "Oh, nothing." Ever since he'd been replaying that line, and this time he was going to say what he'd been dying to say for 20 years.

"Johnny, I love you," he said, and as I looked at him, lying beautifully on the float, the sun gilding his skin, I knew that Johnny had loved him too.

"Listen very carefully," I said to him. "I'm going to leave tomorrow, and you're never going to see me again. It's because my family's moving, not because I don't want to see you again." I smiled at him, and turned my body a bit so he could see that I was getting an erection as I spoke.

"Don't be afraid to love me, Randy. I love you, too. I've always loved you, I've only been afraid to say so."

I saw the shocked smile grow on his face, the tears start at the corners of his eyes. "Johnny," he whispered, and I made a long, cinematic approach to the slowest, sweetest and most-anticipated kiss he'd ever known. In the course of a few minutes I helped Randy to relive a whole afternoon, only this time it went the way it should have, and when we parted in the vision he cried, but he was smiling through the tears, and I knew he'd been set free of a twenty-year-old burden.

Carefully, so as not to disturb his revery I let him slip to the floor, and bent to find his wallet for my agreed-upon wage.

I wondered, as I always do, how he'd change after that moment, and whether he'd be better able to love his family, or whether he'd have to leave, and go find his long, lost dream.

Make no mistake. I loved him as much as he loved what he thought I was. Of course it was out of the question to do anything but leave anonymously, though. As always, I felt a bit sad, but this was the way it had to be. I smiled and brushed his sweaty forehead with a kiss, catching a glimpse of his dream, this one untouched by my manipulations. Joyous, pure, erotic, happy and hectic the images flashed on my retinas before I stepped away and found my clothes.

A moment later I shut the door to the motel room behind me, the plastic Do Not Disturb sign swinging back and forth from the doorknob, and reentered the fierce sunlight of a southern California summer.

I jumped a bit when I heard a step behind me and turned to find a man in a dark blue suit approaching. He had fed written all over him.

"You have a light son?" he asked, and as I passed him my lighter I brushed his hand with my own. In the second of contact I learned much of that man's personal life and history, but this revelation was cut short as his partner came swiftly up behind me with a blackjack aimed for the base of my skull.

* * *

I awoke, unsurprisingly, with a splitting headache, and as soon as I was able to look around me, I discovered I was in a small square room with industrial-looking cinderblock walls and no windows. The only door looked to be made out of plate metal with a small, barred window set high up. The only furnishings were a toilet without seat or lid, and a cot that would have been thrown out as unusable in any Boy Scout camp in the country. It was, obviously, a cell. At least I wasn't bound.

When my head stopped throbbing quite so much, I gave some thought to the brief glimpse I'd got from the agent before passing out. Perhaps there was some clue in that glimpse that I could use to figure out where I was and why. 

The man was a government agent, that much was for sure, but he wasn't vice squad—just some secret agency that went simply by "H." I couldn't get more than a glimpse of the other man, as he had never actually touched me, but the agent who had spoken to me was named Wilson. Unfortunately, I couldn't recall anything to explain why Wilson and his comrade was after me—Wilson himself didn't seem to know.

What scared me, though, was that Wilson didn't seem to care, either. 

So I sat on the cot and did what any prisoner does. I tried to remember songs I had learned as a child, and told myself riddles, and tried to keep from going mad. Finally, in boredom and frustration, I went to sleep. 

And there, on the rough cot of the cell, I had a dream. I dreamed there were hundreds of cells, filled with hundreds of prisoners, all shapes, all sizes. In the cell next to mine was a man of middle age who glowed softly in the undisturbed night of what turned out to be some sort of hospital. As my attention came to focus on this man I realized I could see him, and all the others, through the walls of my cell, which had grown transparent, like smoked glass. The glowing man looked up at me and spoke. The words came to me as if they were my own thoughts, but they matched the words I could see his lips form on the other side of my wall. Be careful, he said. Trust no one in this place who isn't locked up. 

The dream faded and I slept soundly, the cot actually being more comfortable than the sidewalk I usually tennanted.

When I awoke, an indefinite time later, it was to the sound of the door opening. 

"Come with me," said a voice that I immediately recognized as that of Wilson, and the agent stood in the doorway, beckoning for me to follow. I squinted in the light of the corridor as I came out of my cell, and I demurely followed the agent. He led me past a number of other cells, and I tried to hear any sounds coming from within, but if there were any tenants in the other cells, they were either silent or well-soundproofed.

We stopped at an unmarked door. Opening the door, Wilson ushered me in and locked the door behind me.

Inside the bare room was a folding card table with a small, balding man holding a sheaf of mimeographed pages. He gestured for me to sit down in a folding chair opposite him and reached out to shake my hand.

I realized for the first time he was seated in a wheelchair. I hesitated, not wishing to seem too eager, and shook the man's hand.

Dark fire exploded in my brain at the man's touch, and in a flash I knew where I was and why. I'd have to bide my time until I could figure out how to escape—for escape I must.

"Please," the man said, "sit down." 

"Let me introduce myself," he continued when I sat. "I'm Agent Smith," though his real name was so buried in the agent's past that he had no recollection of it.

I could only nod. What I had seen in this man's mind had me stunned. I knew I could trust nothing this man would say, but it was in my best interests to pretend to be obedient. "Agent Smith" continued.

"I'm part of a special team the government is putting together to recruit Americans with ... special abilities, shall we say."

Again, I could only nod. What the agent was saying was true, though I doubted I would be told anything useful about the program—like how they intended to use their "recruits."

"Rumor has it you are one of those Americans," said "Smith," and it seemed like he was expecting a response this time.

"What do you want from me?" I asked.

"We're merely going to run you through some tests," he answered, "and depending on what we find, we may offer you a job."

"So why didn't you send me a letter?"

"Smith" smiled. "Would you have us mail it to your street corner? But seriously, Johnny, we have a need for secrecy. And let's say your record didn't make us feel all that comfortable putting our trust in you." His face hardened, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this man was incapable of an unschooled emotion. "So we made sure you knew how serious we are. We've given you a taste of the jail cell you've been dodging for the past few years, and we hope this'll help you understand just how serious we are. If you don't play ball with us, we'll make sure you can't play ball with the enemy, either."

"Enemy?"

"Don't let the press fool you," he said. "The enemy's still out there."

"And what happens when your tests show I'm just an ordinary guy and don't have any ... special abilities?" I had to ask, to maintain an appearance of naiveté, though I knew full well he was planning on killing me. "Disappearing me" was the term in his mind.

"We'll return you to where we found you," he lied smoothly, "with enough pay to make up for any lost ... business." The agent's speech was full of pauses to emphasize the 

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